Put down the smart phone

Jan. 1, 2020
I sit on the edge of a generation. Chronologically, I am a Baby Boomer. Technically — and I mean that as a double entendre — I am more Generation X.

I sit on the edge of a generation. Chronologically, I am a Baby Boomer. Technically — and I mean that as a double entendre — I am more Generation X. This means that I have two different kinds of friends. It recently occurred to me that the differences between the two group philosophies are sometimes very stark. My boomer friends are handshake, face-to-face communicators and most of my Gen X friends are email or text friendly and actually avoid picking up a phone or, heaven forbid, calling on someone in person.

Who hasn’t been somewhere where a group of kids are all face down in their phones while sitting together? Are they ignoring one another? The answer, according to my 14-year-old is probably not. They may be texting one another across the table or helping another friend who cannot be with them to “join in.” I actually watched a young couple, apparently on a date, engaged in texting rather than talking to one another. Arguably the polar opposite of the pick-you-up-at-8 and hold-the-door approach my Baby Boomer parents taught me.

It seems to me that the element being lost in favor of efficiency and speed may be the ability to communicate face to face. Many of us who are a little older probably place a good deal of weight on being able to read another person’s body language, which is not an old guy’s term for “hooking up”.

The point I am making is real face time is not only important in our daily life, but also in our business life. With the tight budgets that most of us are working with, conference calls have replaced many meetings and email has replaced many phone calls. With both of these, a certain amount of the human element of negotiation goes away, too. There is no doubt that lots of good work can be done using technology, and they are invaluable tools that can be effective with a little behavior modification and some allowances for not being in the same room. The question to me is determining when a situation needs a personal touch. A recent situation I observed seemed like a perfect example of the need to get away from email and phone.

I was working on a custom car for a customer who had recently received it from a builder in another state. To avoid convoluting the message here, let me say that almost everything that could go wrong building this car had occurred with very little effort to mediate the resulting lack of confidence that was the natural response by the customer. When the car came to the shop, we found a number of glaring issues that were clearly overlooked when the car was assembled. I made a courtesy call to the builder to suggest that he might want to get involved in the corrections. I was informed that there was a special place that I could go and take my advice.

Despite an expenditure of more than $125,000, the people who built the car were not interested in helping their customer. Currently, the court system is deciding how best to resolve a very clear-cut case with airtight evidence and paper trails.

You and I may have never had a customer with this kind of problem, but how we respond to something as simple as failing to fill an order on time or not providing the right information to widen a customer’s knowledge before making a decision can be a deal breaker that ends a relationship. Weighing the risk might sound sort of callous, but I think you have to look at these things from a mostly non-emotional point, and how you communicate can be a big deal. Let’s look at some considerations.

Is this a good customer?

Is this a customer who is connected with lots of people?

Would they be likely to bad mouth your business?

Do you feel, in any way that you let this customer down?

Do you care about this customer and how they feel about you or your business?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, I think you need to go old school and pick up the phone and ask for a meeting. If you are the kind of guy who would break up with a girl by email or text, this will be very uncomfortable. The reward is that, regardless of outcome, if you show that you made a real effort, you will almost certainly feel better after you listen to your customer. You might learn something about working with other customers in the process and only feel uncomfortable once in your life but, I wouldn’t count on that.

Text and email are efficiency tools. Sometimes customer service is not about efficiency. Sometimes it is about your face and your willingness to show it.

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